A fire at a migration detention center in Mexico’s northern border city of Ciudad Juárez on Monday night left 39 people dead, according to reports.
The blaze at the office of the National Migration Institute (INM) in Chihuahua state, just south of El Paso, Texas, led to 37 deaths inside the facility followed by another two deaths in hospitals, according to El Diario de Chihuahua.
The outlet reported that the disaster is the worst tragedy to occur at a migrant center in the city. The facility, which is near the Santa Fe International Bridge connecting Mexico with the U.S., was reportedly holding around 70 people at the time the fire broke out.
No official statement has yet been given as to the cause of the fire, and officials have not confirmed what happened. Local media reports have suggested that there may have been some type of disturbance or protest inside the facility before the flames erupted in the men’s section of the complex.
Images taken by reporters show a chaotic scene of ambulances, paramedics, and police attending to people outside. Others show people lying on the ground wrapped in foil blankets. News agency EFE reports that many of the people inside the facility were Venezuelan migrants attempting to enter the U.S., though no official statement has yet been released concerning the victims’ nationalities.
INM officials had conducted an operation to round up migrants from the streets of Ciudad Juárez before the fire broke out. Some local media reports have suggested that victims were trapped inside the building as the disaster unfolded.
“This is going to be long, easy until 5 or 6 in the morning, there are many corpses,” one paramedic said outside the facility, El Heraldo de Chihuahua reports. The outlet also cited a Civil Protection source as saying that most of the victims died from suffocation rather than burns, though no official statement has been made about the victims’ cause of death.
The number of migrants in the area has risen dramatically over the last year, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. In the fiscal year to September 2022, migrant border crossings reached a record 2.76 million—over one million higher than 1.72 million figure recorded in the previous year.
The increase has largely been driven by a sharp uptick in the number of Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans attempting to cross into the U.S., the CBP said.
Monday night’s tragedy comes as the Biden administration plans to end the Trump-era Title 42 immigration approach. The policy, which was first introduced during the COVID pandemic, allows border officials to deny migrants’ entry to the U.S. “to prevent the spread of communicable disease.”
Title 42 is still in effect after a Supreme Court ruling in December, but it’s thought the policy could be scrapped on May 11 when the public health emergency on COVID is ended.
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